Last week’s Raw opening was incredible. Daniel Bryan was in a genuinely emotional state, Stephanie McMahon was at her diabolical worst and Kane was eschewing years of ridiculous character perversions to show up as a deadly giant monster and tombstone piledriver Bryan to death on everything he could find. It was visceral and intense, and set a great tone for their championship match at Extreme Rules.

This week? Not so much.

Bryan and Kane did as well as they could in their roles, but oh man, their roles were bad. Bryan went from the people’s hero to John Cena stuck in a horror movie, striking people with wrenches and never being sure if he’s supposed to sell the neck brace or not. Kane went from a believable, powerful monster to a guy who comes up through a hole in the ring and tries to drag you to literal Christian Hell with MOOD LIGHTING. Brie Bella went from someone who is supposed to be a top WWE Diva to a woman the announce team constantly questions (“Why is SHE getting a Divas Championship match??”), unable to defend herself and stricken with deadly fear even though she’s been working with this scary dude for years and should know what’s up.

So many questions. Why didn’t Brie pick up the wrench and start swinging it herself? What exactly was Kane trying to do to her, anyway? Couldn’t Bryan just wait for Kane to drag her under the ring, then go under the ring and pull her out? There wasn’t a pillar of fire bursting out of it like that time he tried to abduct Eve Torres. Why did they tease Kane’s mask being “locked away” under a glass box they’ve established can just be lifted up, only for him to “unlock” it or whatever and put it back on? Does Kane put the mask back into safe keeping when he’s done being a monster? Is he Corporate Kane six days a week? How did the cameraman get that same panning shot of the mask box three times, but not get footage of Kane taking it?

Best: Strumming My Pain With His Fingers, Singing My Life With His Words

And now, a guy who just gets me.

I applaud WWE for making Brandon Stroud a wrestling character and having Wade Barrett play him. Bad News Barrett’s rundown of Rob Van Dam is exactly the kind of thing I’d type in this report, and I may or may not have an Arrested Development-style surrogate situation happening. I did notice myself turning my elbow pad inside out for no reason yesterday.

I also like Barrett saying he was in diapers the last time Van Dam was relevant. Is Bad News Barrett supposed to be a badass 18-year old?

Worst: A Limp End To A Great Tournament

The match itself wasn’t great, as Rob Van Dam matches tend to be. He just takes offense until it’s time for the other guy to lie down and take his. That would’ve been bad enough on its own — notice the absence of “this is awesome” chants this week — but the match and the tournament had to end with interference from two concurrently feuding guys. All right.

Van Dam’s doing well, but gets interrupted by the appearance of Cesaro. Jack Swagger, the only obvious heel in this entire thing, runs down to pull Cesaro off the apron and save Van Dam? But whoops, he gets trounced and Cesaro interferes anyway, at least enough for Van Dam to take too long on a frog splash and get caught with knees. One Dog Boner later and we’re spared the atrocity of a Big E/Rob Van Dam match. After the match, everybody fights everybody, and … man, I don’t know.

I’m sad that the tournament had to end in a TNA main event, but we’ll always have Barrett/Sheamus. Let’s put Barrett over Big E at Extreme Rules and run Cesaro and Sheamus at him, okay? Don’t just let him hold the belt from atop his motorized News Podium and forget it’s supposed to involve wrestling matches.

Worst: Let’s Ask The WWE Universe What They Thought About The Tournament Finals

I love you, Ric Flair, but it may be time for you to assume the Stu Hart role of sitting in the front row and waving politely. “Hey Triple H, I know you! You like ribeyes! The Shield’s great! Oh man Dave remember when you stuck those broads, you were gassed for a week, wooo.”

At least the Bray Wyatt Children’s Gospel Chorus was on RAW, so you would actually appreciate it. Had it been on Smackdown, Nate would’ve summarily worsted it, written a similarly-worded version of your initial Worst, and moved onto the next thing.

Oh, also, re: Cena beating Bray to stop the message getting out – isn’t that the most Cena thing ever to say? “If I beat this guy this weekend, he won’t matter anymore and people won’t care what he has to say.” That’s the way I took it, anyway. Bray doesn’t care if he wins or loses, he’s still going to preach his message, but in Cena’s narrow worldview, where wins matter most because he wins all the time, it actually made sense to me.

I think you have a very good point here. Bray Wyatt at this point, is unstoppable. No matter how much you beat him, how often you triumph against the odds, he will still have his message, his cult, his following. He is positioned as the inevitable, immutable. Whereas Cena is a machine built on wins and only wins and being able to beat anyone but how does he beat a philosophy? How does he beat a belief? How do you beat a man that can have a chorus of children in sheep masks following his mad rantings?

Within this particular canon, you cannot.

Thus, in theory, at some point Cena has to be driven to madness. You can pin a man, but you can’t pin a belief, and that is what Bray functions upon. This would be the perfect set up for Cena to turn heel, if it were a dramatic story written by intelligent and subtle writers.

However, ultimately it is the WWE, so hell I dunno, maybe not. I know how I would like it to play out, but they may just go for the cheap “Cena beats the Wyatt family again, blah blah blah” and keep on selling t-shirts and whatnot and then next month Cena has a feud with Cesaro because whatever, asses in seats and so forth.

Oh but if they could manage to pull John Cena into hell and destroy him, only to have him pull himself out again and seek redemption… well they would have some epic Greek drama on their hands then. I don’t honestly think the writer’s have it in them, but one can hope.

I dont get the “he doesnt care wether he wins or loses” part. Then why is he fighting? If he isnt in it to win why does he get mad when Cena kicks out? Why does he fight Cena?

I just dont like the feud. I like Bray, however everything he says in the feud is hollow. Cena wont change. Cena is Cena. And Bray will move onto his next feud and this one will be forgotten just like his feud with Bryan is forgotten.

This reminds me of Cena’s feud with Mark Henry last year. Everything Henry said was hollow because you knew that Cena would overcome.

Cena is also the main reason Im not a huge fan of DBry. Dude reminds me of Cena more everytime I see him in a feud. At least his feud to Mania was a bit more unpredictible then anything Ive seen Cena in.

He’s trying to get his message out there and tear down the system. Unlike Jern, who lives in a world where wins and losses mean everything, Bray should be willing to take the loss if it furthers the cause.

Brandon: I answered your question about how Kane lifted the mask without anyone noticing in a poorly-phrased-but-hilarious-to-me-not-at-all-dated reference to how Keanu Reeves tricked Dennis Hopper in Speed looping the video of the bus.

I’m a sucker for bridging suplexes and I like everything Cesaro does, so the combination of that and Heyman pulling Zeb’s moustache made me really happy about that Swagger/Cesaro ending even though the match itself was kind of underwhelming.

I also echo what Brandon wrote about Sandow. The more ridiculous shit they make him do, the more I respect him for doing them with a straight face. It’s just said that this is the way WWE is deciding to use his talent. But I still sort of enjoyed it. Better than seeing him lose a squash match to Sin Cara.

I hate that Brie is just lady-Daniel Bryan and I hate that she was made to look like a helpess prop. Also why the hell did she go back in the ring after she managed to escape? And that backstage bit where she was shaking and then called Stephanie a bitch just showed how bad an actress she is. I mean, I like Brie but she should not be allowed to act too much.

Brie went back to try and take care of her husband. Thought that was really obvious; she was just concerned with the health of the guy she just married. Also, didn’t Brie kick Kane in the face several times in the end and escape on her own? No offense but I think she looked just find. Her husband fought to help her but in the end she did save herself, albeit after putting herself back in harms way over Bryan.

Your right about the wwe using the same fights over and over. But they are doing the exact opposite with Tamina and Paige. Those two have not been in the same ring since AJ dropped the title. No stare downs, no tag matches. The story line is, these 2 women were told to fight, now they are going to fight. WeeLC may suck but it has more story line build up than the diva match.

And Tamina/Paige not having any ring time together is probably a *bad* thing. They surely haven’t had many matches together (none that I know of, but I’m sure they’ve worked together off-camera). What I’m saying is that I don’t want Paige to get her brain scrambled by one of Tamina’s sloppy superkicks because the two don’t have their timing worked out.

They’ve had a match in the NXT Women’s Championship tournament, back when Tamina wasn’t AJ’s Diesel yet. It was nothing special, but Tamina’s atrociousness showed. Anyway, I just don’t think Tamina improved enough in the ring to make that match anything special this time around either.

I’m not worried about Tamina. There’s some doom and gloom of her ring work, but Paige’ll probably come out of this uninjured. My question is, who’s next? Whoever it is needs to have a real feud with Paige, otherwise it just turns into that post-Kaitlyn part of AJ’s reign where the matches were ok-ish but nothing mattered and nobody cared.

I’m wondering if they’re just using Tamina to hold a spot open til AJ’s done with her “time off”. They can have some matches and eventually AJ comes back, interferes and the Paige/AJ feud (which will be great) can kick off

Neither would I, BRBRCK. I didn’t mention her cuz I figured the chances of WWE unleashing Summer Rae were low. If they did, she could easily fight Paige for a few months until AJ makes her return or they build up other credible challengers during such time.

If you look at Renee Young and the first thing you are reminded of is when two mid-card wrestlers were paired together based on the fact that they are of similar ethnicity and that they wore matching red outfits at one point,

“On top of all that, there was just something off with the production. At the end, when the kid in the sheep mask sat on Bray’s knee, that should’ve been the BLEARP and jump to commercial. Instead, we hung on Bray for a loooong time, listening to his maniacal laughter sound less and less legit until he was doing a scene from Austin Powers. Then we got MULTIPLE REPLAYS of the entire thing, lengthy singing and laughing included. By the end of the show I was like Cena … I’d been hit by how crazy and cool it was, but a few hours later I was just sick of having to think about it.”

Thank. You. I’ve been reading online about how AWESOME the opening segment was…It just went on and on for me. I couldn’t watch it. And the endless recaps drove me up the wall.

And, Jern? If you’re really serious about stopping Bray’s message, why would you allow him to trot out a choir of children wearing sheep masks on what was the highest-rated cable program last night (1.8 share, tied with the NBA playoffs)?

I think you’re assigning a completely different meaning to Cena’s “shrugging it off” than I am. I know I get caught up in giving them too much credit sometimes but I think WWE is purposely trying to portray the breaking down of that “switch” you’re talking about. Just the way it’s going back and forth so much, I feel like they’re trying to portray him as a guy who’s trying to salvage his crumbling facade by putting it on no matter how many cracks there are in it. I think there is every indication that Cena could actually undergo some kind of serious, permanent change after this feud.

Fantasy Booking: Bo Dallas shows up to pronounce to the world that he’s John Cena’s BIGGEST FAN (immediate heel heat) and starts following Cena around and annoying the hell out of him. And no matter how hard Cena tries to like him, he can’t STAND him. Then he finds out he’s Bray Wyatt’s brother and Bray brought him here to make Cena absolutely DESPISE his #1 fan in the whole world. Cena remains babyface but he’s never the same again because he can’t live with himself.

Sidenote: I am so on board for more of John Cena going full Bo Dallas and being all “how could you do this to me?” and “THINGS HAVE CHANGED” and “why have you forsaken me?” If we start getting more of that John Cena, I will seriously buy a John Cena shirt. Especially if he starts having ten minute hoss fights on Raw with future stars like Cesaro and Luke Harper.

but I would accept it the same way if WWE realizes that Cena can earn fans respect by having hoss fights with the likes of Cesaro and Harper while still being the same and selling as much merch as ever, but not joking or ruining anybody’s career and wasting everybody’s time.

The shame of it all is that Cena is good at being shocked and aghast and uncertain. He looked spooked last night in the cage, he is capable, when he chooses, of being dynamic and compelling.
Until he decides to not be, and make jerking off gestures and annihilating everyone else’s kayfabe.
John Cena is the John Wilkes Booth of character development.

Cena is very good in the ring at acting. He acts like he gets his head kicked in every match. He acts like he can lock in a submission hold almost every match. He acts like superman at the end of every match. Hes a very capable actor.

Another note: On Main Event last night they showed Cena doing the make a wish thing. How is it that I cant not like John Cena the person but I despise John Cena the wrestler?

- This is probably the most pointless episode of RAW I’ve seen in months. Almost everyone came out of this looking stupid. Not a single feud really got anything new or beneficial from what happened here.

Really hate how WWE is trying to get Brie some love with the crowd by having her just leach off of Daniel Bryan’s act and momentum. Can’t say I’m surprised, though. They did do the exact same thing with her twin sister, who is basically Lady John Cena now. Says a lot about the Bella twins as people. Basically, they are both so boring and shallow that even WWE can’t think of anything to make them interesting. So instead they just have them mimic their popular boyfriend/husband.

During their first run, they were mostly heels, where their stunted-breath-bitchy way of talking kinda gave them a mean girls vibe. Now, as “faces”, they can’t do that, they have to be loud and angry, so they come off simple and shallow. WWE sees that and is lazy so they figure ape your popular others and soon love shall follow, like that ever works.

I stopped watching wrestling all together from about 2004-2012, and just got back in to full time watching about 6-months ago thanks to these posts from Brandon and a fan I work with every Monday night. So I missed any time when the Bellas weren’t who they are now.

Well, they weren’t that good. If you remember their feud with the Funkadactyls around last year’s Wrestlemania, that’s what they were mostly like. But, you know, it was something, and during their first run it was more than most girls were doing.

It’s such a shame that the Wyatt choir and Sandow segment dragged on for so long. If they didn’t take the long route to get to the fire works factory, both segments would have been way more impactful.

It’s amazing how wrestlers who show their real life personality start to connect with the audience. Rybaxel is something I actually want to see, now that they’re showing some personality. Especially Ryback, who has brought his twitter account to life.

Fantasy booking: Alicia Fox becomes heel and lays a beat down to Paige. She can go with the whole “you didn’t earn it and your title win was a fluke” storyline. Let WWE’s best kept secret, Alicia Fox’s wrestling ability, out of the bag and let those two go at it.

Here’s hoping Russev wins and finally gets put in a feud against someone better than R-Truth and R-Truth Jr. It sucks that the fans aren’t really connecting with him. But then again, why should they? Russev/Ziggler would be pretty good feud that could open a PPV.

WWE does these monster pushes all the time and Ziggler always seems they’re go to guy. Why bother doing it again when it’s never impressive to beat him? You really want Rusev to look good, have him beat Sheamus. Nobody cares if he beats jobbers.*

*And I’m not totally saying this as a still sadly hopeful Ziggler fan who doesn’t want to see another loss